I am having some problems with my Desktop on a relatively new Lion install. I can't move folders around (when I try, the icon gets the slashed-O "no" symbol and they bounce back where they came from), and the "New Folder" menu item on Finder is grayed out (and, likewise, shift-cmnd-N does nothing).

Deleting my ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist file, and having that regenerate after a restart.

Confirming that the Desktop is not locked, both through Finder "get info" (confirming that the "Locked" checkbox is not checked) and through ls -lO (no flags listed).

Further, I have noticed that although I cannot create a new folder on the Desktop using shift-cmnd-N or the Finder menu, I can "mkdir" a new Desktop folder in the terminal.

Any ideas?

Update: I may have found a clue -- the result of xattr -l Desktop shows that the com.apple.FinderInfo attribute is set, with bytes 9 and 10 set to 20 and 10 respectively. Is this normal? (By contrast, my older Mac has no attributes set on Desktop.)